Tesla has sued a bloke it claims was behind an effort to sabotage the electric car maker by leaking its confidential blueprints.
A complaint [PDF] lodged with the Nevada US District Court today names Martin Tripp, a former technician at the Tesla Nevada Gigafactory plant, as the alleged culprit behind a string of hacking and …

Civil discovery process?

Soo.. How's that work? Civil lawsuits could be decidely uncivil, and people's computers may contain a lot of sensitive personal information that's unrelated to the complaint. So who gets to fish? ie is that a semi-neutral party, or is your computer handed over to the plaintiff's lawyers, and potentially the plaintiff. That could be embarassing, or just inconvenient if it's used to deny someone access to their computer(s) whilst discovery is ongoing. Which can be bad enough in criminal cases given the time it can take for forensics to come back.

Re: Civil discovery process?

During this kind of order, a "neutral" third-party (lawyer or audit firm) will review the evidence seized to make sure nothing pertaining to attorney-client privilege is accessed by the plaintiff. The defendant can refuse to give access to his computers, but by doing so exposes himself to being charged with contempt. See Anton Piller order for more info.

Computer forensics

If this plaintiff is half as smart with I.T. as they say he is then surely they already know that any incriminating evidence is already gone and has been replaced with deep fakes of Elin Musk pole dancing with a Falcon 9 stage 1.

Everyone else making an EV would be glad to get rid of that pesky startup with the loudmouth CEO that keeps one-upping them and making them look bad.

I very much doubt that. Other car makers are delighted that Musk is learning all the hard lessons for them, pioneering a market that's currently unprofitable, and gaining notoriety for his emotive response to the inevitable problems of a very steep learning curve. If Ford, say, had thrown this volume of money and resource into a production EV, then all major competitors would have been compelled to do the same. Whilst an upstart is doing it, they can do what they're doing, which is much slower and more measured progress.

If and when EVs become the main choice of vehicle, Tesla's early and convincing lead will be worth little. Look at the all the internet search engine pioneers - their various early leads merely paved the way for Google. De Havilland flew the world's first passenger jet airliner, but it was other firms who now rule the airline market. IBM launched the first personal computer and aren't even in that line of business any more. You can argue who invented the smartphone and when, but it certainly wasn't Apple or Samsung who now dominate. And so I could go on. The point is that first movers and pioneers often do well to start with, but rarely survive in the longer term - any good bits will be picked off the carcase and reused, but if Tesla is still an independent car maker in 2030 I'll be amazed.

Well, this sums up the whole issue. People keep putting Tesla into a Car manufacture when it's an Energy & Lifestyle company that doesn't fit into any financial analysis box. Hence they don't understand.

Tesla does produce cars. But, it also produces Gig amounts of batteries that are managed by IP software that beats the competition. This alone would be a nice business.

It also has a Roof Solar Tile that it can't again make enough off. Yet another long queue!

It also has a batteries Tesla PowerWall 2. Despite not making Home use worth it. Rather a lot of Pizza pad have used it to reduce their costs of connection to the Grid. Several other Commercial projects are also being deployed. 1100 last count.

It's associated company happens to be able to put a completely separate Mesh Internet up into the sky which will be accessible to everyone on the planet!

" Other car makers are delighted that Musk is learning all the hard lessons for them"

Other car makers are already building electric cars. You're far more likely to see a Nissan Leaf than you are a Tesla, as Nissan sells a lot more of them than Tesla ever has.

Not sure why people are upvoting conspiracy and downvoting people who point out the facts - "big car" and "big oil" aren't the reasons why Tesla is failing to meet production targets, and making poor quality cars - it's self inflicted. British Leyland would be proud...

Enron Musk would do well to actually listen to Toyota on how to mass produce a quality car, instead of ignoring them and failing to produce anywhere close to the same amount of cars that GM-Toyota did in that same plant, 20 years ago.

I see Teslas

"You're far more likely to see a Nissan Leaf than you are a Tesla"

I see at least 2 tesla every day on my way home and to work. Yet to get one of them to race me. If I catch them on the highway I have a chance (60-120mph) from a dead stop they will beat me off the line - if the driver has enough balls to push it hard that is.

@AC - what is certain is that he is member #1 of the Elon Musk Fan Club. It would seem that he is unraveling with he recent behaviour at press conferences.

As for people being out to get him - no. Observing that he has clay feet does not mean he is being attacked. To date the overwhelming coverage of the man has been positive to the point of sycophancy, so any real analysis jars with the worshipful regard expected.

It appears that Musk is seeing the possible bursting of the electric car bubble since to run an electric car you need plenty of cheap, reliable electricity, something you don't get with solar and wind (solar, no sun no power and windmills don't provide power when the wind isn't blowing).

Well, it certainly won't be from Hinkley Point C - the "strike price" has well and truly shafted the consumer even before the things have been built. Not to worry - the government gets another chance to shaft the consumers with Sizewell C

Well, it certainly won't be from Hinkley Point C - the "strike price" has well and truly shafted the consumer even before the things have been built. Not to worry - the government gets another chance to shaft the consumers with Sizewell C

If EDF go ahead, which isn't yet clear. But government have made sure of failure and high cost nuclear power because they've already promised a strike price of around £75 MWh (plus inflation) for the Hitachi proposal at Wylfa. Kepco will expect similar treatment for Moorside (Windscale). The Chinese paymasters for Hinkley have made it clear that the money was only forthcoming if they could build their own design variant at Bradwell.

Which means that the UK's new nuclear fleet will be made up at least four different hugely subsidised designs, two of which have never been built before, and the other which has never been built in Europe before. Whilst the Areva EPR is under construction in Europe, neither of the six-ten year late ones at Oikliuoto and Flamanville have generated power yet. The only company with proven international expertise in building working nuclear reactors at reasonable cost is Kepco, who should have been the first and only choice for UK nuclear power - but its now too late to rectify the compounded twenty year bungling of Britain's civil servants.

The nuclear power stations that have been built before are the ones that shouldn't be considered. Using the criteria that only installed designs should be considered means that there will be no advancements in nuclear plant designs. I'd like to see a modern LFTR plant put into operation. There has never been a commercial one of those built and the last test model that was run didn't have a turbine attached so it just made heat and naught else.

For nuclear power to be viable, there has to be improvements made to the designs with preference for ones that can "burn down" existing nuclear waste that has been generate thus far with the old designs.

"Not to worry - the government gets another chance to shaft the consumers with Sizewell C"

Compared with what "renewables" producers are being paid, those nuke plants are going to be selling bargain basement priced electrickery.

Coal, oil and gas generation is going away. Renewables can match their current production but they can't meet the increases that are required to replace gas/oil heating, internal combustion engines and industrial processes such as cement making.

"Compared with what "renewables" producers are being paid, those nuke plants are going to be selling bargain basement priced electrickery."

Don't think that is correct. Here in NL the government used to subsidise offshore wind energy. But the new wind farms no longer need that subsidy for generation (think there is still some support for the link to shore). And in my view one of the key problems with nuclear is that eventually there will be very high decomissioning costs, which might well fall on the taxpayer :(

Forcing gridcos to take renewables energy as first choice - even when there's more generation than demand - that's a subsidy too

Forcing gridcos to eat the entire cost of having to overlay the distribution network in order to handle power flows changing direction without much notice - another subsidy

Forcing gridcos to build transmission lines to the generation point - another subsidy (normal producers have to pay for those lines themselves)

When I see renewables operators being paid the same bulk rates as other generators then I'll believe that subsides are mostly gone.

Apart from the above, some of those rules contribute to grid instability. The infamous South Australian statewide blackouts occured due to dropoffs in wind generation happening, but the weather forecasts being for a resumption in 4-6 hours - not enough time for a backup gas power station to repay its startup costs, let alone the hourly ones, before they would have been forced to turn the plant off again - so the power generator declined to fire it up and the state went dark for 6 hours.

In order to prevent repeats, SA installed Elon's battery farm, but even that isn't enough for prolonged wind outages, so agreements have been made for backup operators to be paid well enough to justify turning the plants on - but a plant that's only run for a couple of hundred hours a year still requires maintenance and effectively produces power costing dollars per kWh instead of a few cents.

All this means that renewables actually cost about 10 times what "normal" generation does - which is ok for a peak-load generation plant but utter bollocks for your economics if they're supposed to be baseline.

If you think rolling blackouts won't happen here, you're being naive. Yes, renewables can just about replace existing electricity generation, but there's no capacity left to cater to the increases coming from decarbonising transport, heating, etc. Electricity generation only accounts for 25-35% of carbon emissions and generation capacity has to be sized for peak loads, not average ones.

This person does have a point, what if nuclear power stations had been targeted by Al Qaeda during 9/11 instead of the Pentagon, the WTC and the failed attack on Capitol Hill ? Hate to think of a plane crashing into a sodium cooled FBR and the subsequent sodium fire. Let's hope fusion gets perfected as there are just too many risks with fission.

Chances are that the nuclear plant would have held up very well to an airplane crash. The containment buildings are designed with that in mind. Search YouTube for video of crash tests where a fighter plane was flung at a mock up of a containment building wall. It's impressive. The World Trade Center buildings were an easy, high profile target for inexperienced pilots to hit. Washington DC might have been too hard of a nut to crack, though with the strike on the Pentagon, maybe it wouldn't have been.

I don't like Sodium cooled reactors for the same reason you are pointing out. Leaking hot Sodium metal is a massive hazard. There is a reactor in Japan where they dropped a crane into the Sodium pool. That spelled the end of that reactor and I think it is still just sitting there waiting to be cleaned up.

Plan crashing into nuclear reactor fear

"what if nuclear power stations had been targeted by Al Qaeda during 9/11 instead of the Pentagon, the WTC and the failed attack on Capitol Hill ? Hate to think of a plane crashing into a sodium cooled FBR and the subsequent sodium fire."

The design specification is for the containment building to survive an airliner crashed directly into the containment building whether it is sodium or water cooled doesn't really matter.

Re: Let's hope fusion gets perfected as there are just too many risks with fission.

"what if nuclear power stations had been targeted by Al Qaeda during 9/11 instead of the Pentagon, the WTC and the failed attack on Capitol Hill "

Not much. Even if the containment building had been breached the reactor pressure vessel inside is quite small and well protected.

'It's almost as if they were designed to withstand an airliner crashing into them from the outset.....'

"Hate to think of a plane crashing into a sodium cooled FBR and the subsequent sodium fire."

Sodium FBRs have a habit of catching fire without needing any assistance from external factors, Look at Monju. However as they don't need to be designed to cater to a steam explosion the containment buildings are much smaller and even tougher than PWR reactors.

There are plenty of other cheap sources of renewable electricity available other than just wind and solar. But even without those, when was the last time an entire day didn't have the wind blowing and didn't see any sun somewhere within 1000km from you?

Electric cars aren't a bubble, and they won't be disappearing any time soon.

...There are plenty of other cheap sources of renewable electricity available other than just wind and solar. But even without those, when was the last time an entire day didn't have the wind blowing and didn't see any sun somewhere within 1000km from you?...

Er. no. Cheap, yes. 'Renewable', no.

It is common for the whole of Europe to have still periods of several days duration. And the last time there wasn't any sun within 621 miles of me was last night....

@Def: clearly you have never read...

Lulls in wind occur over large geographical regions on a pretty regular basis. We've known about this for quite a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doldrums. Winter high pressures over the UK often combine little to no wind over a large area, with much reduced solar power from the very short days. For grid quantities of power, batteries are currently not viable, and pump storage is difficult to scale even with the right terrain.

Re: @Def: clearly you have never read...

When the UK can't generate enough of its own power, what's stopping it from importing solar energy from southern Europe/north Africa, wind energy from Denmark, nuclear energy from France, or hydro energy from Norway?

Re: @Def: clearly you have never read...

You can minimise them by moving to HVDC, but you still can't go much past 1,000,000 volts without getting all kinds of corona effects along the line. You can't make the lines heavier to carry more current as that means closer spaced towers and each tower is a leakage point for your power feed. You really don't want your corona to turn into an arc with DC because you have to shutdown the entire feed to stop it (DC arcs are self-sustaining)

Underwater cables are even worse and the largest undersea connectors anywhere are only about 2GW

As for north Africa: There's a shedload of potential demand building up in the countries where it would be generated and the inhabitants won't take kindly to "new colonialists" shipping it off for consumption elsewhere.

There are these fantastic things which can store electricity so you can store it up when the sun is shining or when demand is well below supply from your nuclear power station and then use it later. I think they're called 'accumulators' or something like that. I've heard rumours that these new-fangled electric cars may contain them: I'd assumed they were loke trams used to be and ran from overhead wites but apparently not so.

Batteries in cars

Actually, if someone can get the meters and APIs properly organised (and I don't mean the mess that is the current "smart-meter" roll-out), then electric cars are JUST what's needed to help balance the grid when fed largely from intermittent sources. This is because 90% of the time, an electric car owner, charging at home, doesn't NEED to be charging it at specific times - (s)he simply needs it to average enough charge to handle the daily commute over the course of a week - if it happens not to get charge on a windless night, but then gets a charge instead the following windy/bright evening then that's fine. Yes, there are times (before a long trip) when the car MUST be charged, and this is not a panacea, but having a large number of plugged in cars, READY to charge but not demanding it is a great way to both reduce consumption at times of peak stress on the system, and also to provide a useful "sink" to take the energy when the other option would be curtailment of generation.

Re: Batteries in cars

Yup. I'm fully off-grid other than internet and drive a 2012 Volt, which I bought new and which has never been charged from the grid, though I have used maybe ~100 gal of gas in its life so far. Home solar is a famine and flood situation as many love to point out (sour grapes? The flood part is nice!) and the car adds to my serious set of home batteries (60kwh nominal but we don't use all that)- I added a way for it to charge the homestead set in emergencies.

The setup works great, and I'm glad I "overpaid" for this engineering marvel from...GM of all people. Bob Lutz, who ran the project at GM admitted, in a Charlie Rose interview with Elon Musk, that Elon's vision and progress was what drove GM to make a car they'd never have made otherwise, and I'm glad they did - Bob is a car guy (Viper while at Chysler, Vette at GM) - and the Volt is a really good car-guy car.

Which they won't make anymore because it costs too much to have it all. But it is nice to have it all, make no mistake.

Sadly it angers all purists. It runs a gasoline engine as required (I manage to almost never do it past having broken it in, but it's nice to know it's there...) - so costs extra. It has limited range, which doesn't matter much because it has a gas engine, but the electric range is such that even in the boonies, where it's a 26 mile round trip to the beer store - I can hot-rod the thing there and back all I want..

And it can be either a parallel or serial hybrid. What heresy!

What it isn't is a glorified golf cart as a few rally wannabe young'ns have found out to their dismay. These mountain roads where I live are quite a lot of fun.

Thanks Elon for risking it all on your vision to make this happen, even if I didn't buy one of yours. I like that hybrid for now, as it's also a generator that can back up my home power - and drive itself to the gas station to refill if needed; I added an inverter to it to make this happen - other engineers know, it ain't yours till the warranty is voided.

Re: Batteries in cars

...This is because 90% of the time, an electric car owner, charging at home, doesn't NEED to be charging it at specific times - (s)he simply needs it to average enough charge to handle the daily commute over the course of a week - if it happens not to get charge on a windless night, but then gets a charge instead the following windy/bright evening then that's fine....

if it doesn't charge on a windless night, then you don't go to work in the morning. Welcome to the Green world of unreliable inefficiency....

Re: Batteries in cars

if it doesn't charge on a windless night, then you don't go to work in the morning. Welcome to the Green world of unreliable inefficiency....

There are a number of Leccy Suppliers who only sell Renewable Leccy. The bigger ones have sources of power from many places around the country. This is either wind or solar or Hydro generation. I don't think that there has been a case where one huge great high pressure has covered the whole of the UK including the wind power generation that is miles out to sea so that there is no wind or solar power being generated.

However there are solutions to even that case. I'll be installing 34kW of Battery in my garage next month. That will allow me to overcome the worse case scenario you paint.

The operatiors of the grid (National Grid) think that having local storage is the way of the future.

34kW will run my home in Winter for more than a week. That means I could go off grid between Christmas and New Year and not use any grid power even if it is renewable.

Slagging off any new tech is a quick way to get upvotes but it won't stop the way things are going forward. Only yesterday, there were moves in Westminster to bring forward the end of ICE cars from 2040 to 2030. London is expanding its ULEZ out to the North and South Circular. Other cities are going to follow suit. The days of using the petrol/diesel engine for private transportation is coming to an end.

That is going to happen. No sarcastic comments or a hundred(or more) downvotes of this post will stop that.

Re: Batteries in cars

I'll be installing 34kW of Battery in my garage next month.

I do hope the cost of that is coming out of your pocket and not the pockets of everyone else via subsidies.

Regarding number of Leccy Suppliers who only sell Renewable Leccy do they also have their own power grid to transmit the power to those that are buying it because if they don't then their statement is a load of hooey and the power you buy from them is most probably from a gas turbine power station.

Re: Batteries in cars

Regarding number of Leccy Suppliers who only sell Renewable Leccy do they also have their own power grid to transmit the power to those that are buying it because if they don't then their statement is a load of hooey and the power you buy from them is most probably from a gas turbine power station.

It isn't a load of hooey.

Say a company like Ecotricity puts 1GW of power into the grid then those electrons are actually available to anyone using power not just Ecotricity customers but what they put in is metered.

Then you take some power from the grid and again, it is metered.

You pay your generator for supplying power to the grid (and thus to you).

Yes, the electrons that I'm using to post this reply might have been coming from a CCGT station but the electrons put into the grid by Ecotricity (other renewable suppliers are available) could have been used by you in posting what I'm replying to. It does not matter. What matters is that the source of our electricity is becoming more and more renewable. According to Gridwatch at the present time some 44% of the electricity being used in the UK is generated from renewable sources.

I'm sure that any of the renewable energy companies would love to explain to you how the grid works and how you as a consumer can use and pay for renewable leccy. Even National Grid have an explanation if you care to look for it.

Re: Batteries in cars

According to Gridwatch at the present time some 44% of the electricity being used in the UK is generated from renewable sources.

At the time of daylight and year when energy demand is lowest and renewable power output happens to be flattered by brisk winds and sunshine. Conversely last week we had a couple of days when wind power generated nothing.

Unfortunately because of the intermittency, we still need all the conventional back up. So all you save is a small amount of relatively cheap fuel, but you still incur all the capital and O&M costs, plus the costs of the "renewables". So the idea of the system being somehow suitable for renewables is bollocks. And in terms of "no separate renewable electric grid is needed", I'd just point out as one example of the huge and costly modifications needed, the near one billion quid spent on the Beauly-Denny transmission link for the sole purpose of shoving wind generated electricity from the north of Scotland to the middle of Scotland. That was a straight subsidy for the windfarms, with the cost recovered from electricity customers. There's plenty of other examples of how the existing grid isn't suitable for the weak and intermittent output of renewables

Re: Batteries in cars

> we still need all the conventional back up. So all you save is a small amount of relatively cheap fuel, but you still incur all the capital and O&M costs, plus the costs of the "renewables".

As carbon-emitting storage becomes steadliy more proscribed (and it will. Look at what's happening int he Laptev Sea), that backup generation will have to become nuclear - which currently doesn't load follow very well.

Moving to molten salt systems makes load following trivial, but at that point the renewables become surplus to requirements because MSR designs should produce power at ~1/4 the cost of renewables.

Re: Batteries in cars

Re: Batteries in cars

I assume you mean 34 kWhr. That's about five pounds-worth of electricity and looking at Powerwall prices you'll be paying something like ten or fifteen thousand pounds for an installation with a twenty-year life, which seems -- high.

But even if you fit that battery, the only way you can be running a house in winter on five kWhr per day is by a) freezing or b) not being in it, or c) heating it by burning something -- gas/oil/logs/peat/furniture. You certainly won't be charging your car from that battery.

Electric cars are great, part of the solution, and electrification of everything -- with its easy interchangeability of primary sources -- is the way to go. But the focus then has to be low-carbon primary energy with power for to support heating, trains, workplace, vehicle charging, synthetic fuels etc consumption. That puts us into the kW+ per person range and the only practical way forward there is nuclear (and no batteries are needed.)

Re: Batteries in cars

if it doesn't charge on a windless night, then you don't go to work in the morning

How to totally miss the point of a post!

Average UK commute is <10 miles each way (mine is about 15 and YMMV). Most EVs now have a range >100 miles, some 2-3x that, so a reasonably (90% optimal normal) charged car will do most/all of the week on one charge, so topping up as and when works fine.

I barely charge mine during the week and tend to "fill up" off the home solar at weekends - what's your EV experience?

Re: Batteries in cars

"if it doesn't charge on a windless night, then you don't go to work in the morning. Welcome to the Green world of unreliable inefficiency...."

That assumes that you use a full charge to get to work and back. With a 240 mile range, that's one heck of a commute. If you have a far more average 20 mile commute each way, that's almost a week of going to work and back.

Yes supply is uneven in your scenarion, but that isn't the full picture. Battery storage, like they are doing around the world evens out that supply, the ideal supply chain goes as follows:

Cheapest energy production > consumer.

But that's been distorted by hypemongers and vested interests. Renewables are great, providing you ignore the economics. So:-

Production: Wind, Wave, Solar. All intermittent that generate power when conditions are right, and can't be matched to demand. Unless you can introduce demand management, ie persuade people only to use their tumble driers when it's sunny/windy. A clothes peg is cheaper. Plus renewables are also expensive, and have a habit of either producing energy when demand is low, or not producing energy when demand is hight.

Tesla is of course in the Solar business having bought out friends & family at Solar City.

Storage: Storing electricity is expensive and inefficient. This is why EV's are expensive and battery packs cost more than ICE engines. Plus there are conversion losses, ie why batteries get hot while they charge. And grid-scale battery storage requires huge stacks of batteries that may only provide enough power for a few minutes.

But Tesla is of course in the business of supplying batteries.

Which also means Tesla's ecosystem demonstrates neatly the problems, ie cost and power output of their solar panels, which could give you an idea of how long it'd take your roof's worth of tiles to charge a Tesla battery. Or just a Powerwall, which doesn't hold anything close enough of a charge to fill a 100kWh car. And costs a small fortune, and is unlikely to ever offer any ROI. Other than feeling a bit green.

Basically grid-scale batteries are a solution to a problem renewables have created, and can't fix because they're fundamental to relying on wind, solar, waves etc rather than predictable gas or nuclear.

The ideal grid storage battery may be EV's. Especially EV fleets used by government agencies, the Post Office, etc etc. There are some fleets that plug into V2G systems. The company that runs the cars manages how much charge they need to have and when so they don't have flat batteries and the grid can use them for balancing when they need to. I think I saw that on "The Fully Charged Show" on YouTube. It might have been Transport Evolved, can't remember. The idea is that with EV's, power can be moved around to take stress off the the grid and base load + intermittent power can be used far more efficiently. Something that can't be done with petrol. I can have a contract that says I'm happy to take and pay for all of the power my EV will accept and the grid can buy back anything they want that doesn't leave me with less than a certain percent of charge unless I indicate that I want a full charge for a trip I'm going to take.

In Japan there is already a company that has designed and implemented the hardware to take a certain brand of used vehicle batteries, stack them in a storage container and use them as storage at solar farms so they can sell power when it fetches the best price rather than being constrained to only being able to sell power when the sun is up. I have seen other startups that do the same to turn used Prius batteries into home storage batteries. That should get more prevalent in the future. A 60kWh battery pack from a Bolt that has lost 1/3 of its capacity isn't great to have in the car, but 40kWh is a ton of power for a home back up including being able to juice up the EV with the new battery pack fitted with power that was harvested during the day from solar panels on the roof.

Green economics

In Japan there is already a company that has designed and implemented the hardware to take a certain brand of used vehicle batteries, stack them in a storage container and use them as storage at solar farms so they can sell power when it fetches the best price rather than being constrained to only being able to sell power when the sun is up.

But that is the problem. It's an artificial way to distort supply and demand, and inflate price, or cost to consumers. Sadly, it's UK government policy, ie constraint payments means millions get given to renewable producers to not supply electricity when there's no demand. Those costs are passed through to consumers via their electricty bills, which then increases energy poverty. Or the cost to businesses, who may decide to relocate production to somewhere where energy costs are lower. Or just increase prices. It's also not novel, ie battery backups or other historical solutions to energy storage like Dinorwyg.

Without subsidies or a rigged market, nobody but off-grid users would buy this energy given it's typically 3-4x the cost of alternatives like gas or nuclear.. And of course because renewables are unreliable and intermittent, you need gas turbines as well for backup.

I have seen other startups that do the same to turn used Prius batteries into home storage batteries.

It shouldn't, but it probably will. There are quite a few YT videos showing people doing this though. Which is also a problem for Tesla. So Tesla's get written off regularly for minor damage due to high repair costs. People buy the cars, strip the battery packs and resell them cannibalising the Powerwall business. Plus adding risks, ie if battery elements are defective, or charging/cooling systems, then there's a risk of fires which aren't easily extinguished. Which can also be a problem with domestic solar installs. If they're done badly and you end up with DC arcs, you may have rooftop fires that do a lot of damage. So warranting and liability issues may mean start-ups get shut down fairly swiftly.

Re: He made one mistake

Back in 1995 I worked on a one year research project for the UK's Energy Technology Support Unit. At that time the Central Electricity Generating Board had calculated that they could take 1/3rd of their power from renewables without having the install energy storage. The processes used to manage the vast changes in demand over the day were enough to cover any drops in wind energy production.

Unfortunately, too many people have forgotten those calculations and refuse to redo them, just saying, without evidence, that we cannot use intermittent power sources. On top of that, we now have better energy storage systems and much, much cheaper solar cells.

The biggest economic problem is that we will soon have leave all the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, to avoid catastrophic greenhouse warming. At that point we have no choice to use any energy source apart from renewables. Some of them can be stored, such as the renewable growth of woodland (particularly with coppicing), biogas produced from sewage and seaweed, straw and catch crops. It may be time to republish Egon Glessinger's 1952 book, "The Coming Age of Wood".

The ideal grid storage battery may be EV's. Especially EV fleets used by government agencies, the Post Office, etc etc.

I have a professional interest in these matters, and without labouring the point, the economics don't work, and even the most optimistic assumptions don't do enough to solve grid balancing issues. They can certainly be actively managed to optimise charging and minimise their own impact on the system, but solving wider grid problems, not a chance.

In Japan there is already a company that has designed and implemented the hardware to take a certain brand of used vehicle batteries, stack them in a storage container and use them as storage

Reuse of vehicle batteries is old hat - Nissan in the UK will already sell you a home battery using recycled car cells. Unfortunately, because the actual cells are only about a quarter of the price of the installed system, and the recovered cells aren't free (recovery costs, inspection & QC, warranty) the savings of a part used battery pack are fairly minimal. For a commercial system you might have a better case because replacing failed cells or banks can be achieved within scheduled maintenance, but you're still buying an asset that has significantly lower life expectancy than using new cells.

Basically grid-scale batteries are a solution to a problem renewables have created

You may be forgetting that batteries don’t have to be electrochemical; one technology from before WWll pumps water up a hill when you have excess supply, like lots of sunshine or wind, and when you haven’t the water runs back down generating electricity. The technology is well understood, costs little to run, and has a decades-long lifetime.

You may be forgetting that batteries don’t have to be electrochemical; one technology from before WWll pumps water up a hill when you have excess supply, like lots of sunshine or wind, and when you haven’t the water runs back down generating electricity. The technology is well understood, costs little to run, and has a decades-long lifetime.

True to an extent. Pumps are well understood. Water's well understood. We know water naturally doesn't want to be up a hill. So you'd have to find suitable hills, dig out large reservoirs, dig tunnels down into the hill, dig out turbine halls and dig out another reservoir to catch the water. So basically more Dinorwigs. But the UK has a lack of suitable hills, and people would object to digging them out. Not to mention the cost and cost of dealing with Nx12mt or more surplus rock from excavations. One possibility might be landfill for the Swansea tidal lagoon to create more waterfront property.

Then there's the cost. Not only the construction, but buying 'renewable' energy at £100/kWh+, adding the storage costs and then trying to sell that electricity when the market rate is £35/kWh or less.

Like much in the renewables scam, everything is great, if you just ignore the economics. And for the UK, there's still the challenge of 'decarbonising' heating as well as transport. So not just forcing everyone into EVs, but forcing them to use electricity for heating and cooking.. Which massively increases demand, and means gizmos like Powerwalls would run flat even faster.

"(powerwall)... costs a small fortune, and is unlikely to ever offer any ROI. Other than feeling a bit green."

The ROI is in having power when the grid goes out - which it's likely to do increasingly in the near future thanks to insufficient generation capacity (plants being shut down) _and_ rapdily increasing demand.

Energy "storage" via existing hydro

Actually, there's an even better way of doing "storage" that I hear they're using in Norway (and via a power sharing arrangement with Denmark), which is to use the existing hydro capacity as the load balancer. When there is plenty of solar/wind etc. you "store" energy by NOT drawing from your hydro reservoirs and when there's a shortage, then you open the sluices. The only work required to optimise this would perhaps be to increase the generating capacity at existing hydro stations, so that they can generate the same total amount of energy, but in a more flexible manner and with a higher peak power.

Re: Energy "storage" via existing hydro

One problem is maintaining flow in a river or you wind up with big tides downstream of the dams. Hydro plants can throttle a little bit, but it's better to think of them as base load plants.

There are pumped storage facilities in different parts of the world that aren't on a river and do what you are describing. They take excess power from the grid to pump water uphill and release it when needed. The one in Wales is about 25% efficient. That's not huge, but much of the power they use is from wind and the turbines would have to be shut down if the pumps weren't using it so that 25% figure has to be adjusted from a purely kWh calculation. I'd like to see more of that type of facility being built.

Re: Energy "storage" via existing hydro

This does not work outside special cases -- Norway being one such of course! There's not enough hydroelectric capacity worldwide and there essentially can't be enough because there aren't enough suitable places to put huge volumes of water high up which are reasonably near other places much lower down, short of civil engineering on an implausible scale.

Note I'm emphatically not against hydroelectric power (or any other kind of renewable power), or against this technique being used when it can be used, such as in Norway.

And the sun rises in the west?

There are so many opinions about renewable energy that it is no surprise that many people have doubts about the viability of Electricity as a replacement for Petrol/Diesel etc.

Some of the frankly crazy points made here don't help either cause.

However, the sign of the times/the way things are going is for the front cover of the current edition of the "Top Gear" magazine is all about Electric Cars specifically, Jaguar I-Pace vs Tesla Model 3 and also going from London to Lands End on a single charge.

Hi Dodgy, I was expecting much larger numbers of people that don't like anyone pointing out the uselessness of unreliables - if they are so good why do they need subsidies from everyone to enable them to compete, after all the wind and sunlight is free.

24 people seem to think that you can get solar power at night and wind power when the wind isn't blowing.

Or alternatively they REALLY don't like you pointing this out.....

Of course you can get Solar power at night, if you store it from the daytime. There are a number of ways of doing that, some are already used to store off-peak power generated by nuclear plants that like to work steadily across demand variations.

And wind generators feed into the grid network, if the local wind turbines you can see are not turning, that doesn't mean that the ones out at sea or at the other end of the country (or in another country) are still.

Charging a car is something which is very well suited to using excess or unreliable energy supplies. Whilst the tech is not yet there to manage the process for electric cars to take power from the grid when there is excess (lots of wind, lower than normal base consumption) actually helps manage the grid by reducing spiky demand.

The only bit missing to make this happen is the "smarts" from somewhere for the chargers to stop taking power from the grid when it's under heavy load.

Use of local (by which I mean personal/individual/on-house) solar or wind power is also ideal because it can take when available and store it to use. With the right control gear you could also only charge your EV if these sources are available (or any other conditions you wanted).

Security

So here's yet another case of a relatively junior person acquiring and running off with a large mass of sensistive data. Because secure computer systems are, clearly, not a thing you need to care about. Let's hope SpaceX are doong a better job, but I bet they're not.

Re: Security

"Considering amount of bullshit Tesla PR machine and Musk himself dump on public and shareholders what makes you think this particular nugget is made of a pure gold ?"

I was thinking the same thing. Elon was sounding like he was attributing all of the negative reports of the past 6 months on planted information from this person. "Let load up this goat with all of our lies and drive him into the desert." Gold? No more than 8ct on the outside.

Re: Security

Re: Security

Brcause they likely don't care. We've reached a point where some contractor for the NSA can acquire a vast trove of sensitive information, and almost no-one asks how the NSA, the people who wrote the fucking orange book, could be running computer systems where it is even possible for this to happen. Computer security is a lost cause, because no-one, actually, cares.

Re: Security

As stated elsewhere more generically, the NSA (or Tesla) systems could be completely invulnerable to hacking and they still would be highly vulnerable to people who incorrectly were thought trustworthy. And they also would be vulnerable to those who, although trustworthy in the normal sense, still are vulnerable to errors of inattention, carelessness, judgment, execution, and more or less clever scams. And the statement is as true of authorized users as of those who are not.

Re: Security

The answer to this is don't consider people trustworthy. Instead you control and audit access to systems and data: no-one has access to sensitive data outside some kind of authorisation, authorisations get signed-off by people who don't have conflicts of interest, access is logged in a tamper-proof way and so on. The access logs are cross-referenced against access requests and so on.

This doesn't stop all attacks: nothing can stop all attacks. But it does make them significantly harder. Some people, financial institutions, for instance, are already doing some or all of this and are working hard on doing more of it (I know this because I have worked on systems like this for these places). But most people seem to just treat it as too hard.

Re: Security

Instituting all manner of (formal?) authorizations, access logging, and cross checking the first with the second does not scale well if it has to be done by people, especially when the reviewers may not be trustworthy. It also is difficult to apply meaningfully for information to which an individual must have routine access in the ordinary course of business. If, on the other hand the authorization and checking is done by systems, it is subject to all the problems that plague system design and implementation in general, most notably that it is done by fallible, sometimes feckless, and occasionally malicious people.

To paraphrase Mencken, information assurance is one of those complex problems for which there is a answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. While we nearly always can improve on the current state, perfection is out of reach.

Re: Security

"Instituting all manner of (formal?) authorizations, access logging, and cross checking the first with the second does not scale well if it has to be done by people, especially when the reviewers may not be trustworthy."

Remote logging/auditing of _everything_ has a discouraging effect on those who might be tempted to fiddle with systems. Keylogging isn't just for bad guys.

Re: Security

Tesla is a big threat to many car manufacturers. SpaceX is a threat only to a couple of rocket companies. The weakest link in any chain the lowest employees or those who view themselves as on the low end. And so the bigger question might be: who's getting the data? With Tesla data, there's lots of potential buyers, with SpaceX, only a few. It's also possible that SpaceX does have a data breach and either doesn't know or hasn't figured who the leaker is yet.

This is strange that they don't have law enforcement involved as other companies many times will.

Re: Security

My point was really that if someone can get malware (which seems to be the claim here) into something involved in designing spacecraft and, for instance, adjust design parameters then quite bad things could happen to the spacecraft.

But this was wrong: if a rocket blows up &/or fails in a way that kills its crew (I know, they are unmanned so far but not presumably in the future) then it's a very visible thing which kills a few people; if someone can do the same thing to a car design then it's a probably less visible thing which could kill a large number of people. So Tesla's security matters more & I was wrong. Or, well, it would matter more if they could actually manage to make any cars.

Re: Security

The data is presumably going to journalist who can then tell you how badly Tesla is doing. There is a large contingent of people betting against Tesla stock which by most measures is considerably overvalued, some of these people want to give the stock a larger push in the down direction. It is one thing to publish true information but being inside and making up stuff or leaving out the details is just more fake news, thats the kind of news none of us need but it is the kind of news that grabs eyeballs.

Having said all that I can't help but wonder if Elon is overstating his case as he habitually does.

Re: Security

"The data is presumably going to journalist "

Then the person is an idiot. Depending on the information that they harvested, other car companies might be quite interested in exchanging a briefcase full of cash for a copy. Multiply that by 10-12 companies and a few other interested parties and that could be a healthy stash tucked away from the sight of the tax man somewhere.

Going to a journalist is an emotional choice. Not impossible, but in a case like this, it's a bigger slap to Elon's face for him to eventually find out that his competitors all have a copy of his data (nothing provable, of course) than to have it paraded in the media (which might wind up happening anyway).

Re: Security

"Tesla is a big threat to many car manufacturers."

Not really. If they were making shed loads of profit, they might be, but anybody can lose money with a sexy product.

"And so the bigger question might be: who's getting the data? With Tesla data, there's lots of potential buyers, with SpaceX, only a few. It's also possible that SpaceX does have a data breach and either doesn't know or hasn't figured who the leaker is yet."

There may be fewer customers for SpaceX data, but they are bigger and the information could be more valuable. Neither company has tech data worth all that much, but detailed financials might be very interesting and details about talks with potential customers would be very valuable.

"This is strange that they don't have law enforcement involved as other companies many times will."

Tesla will need to file a suit today if they haven't already since they have named the person and made public accusations against them. They will also need a judge to approve any subpoenas they want to serve and to issue any data preservation orders. If Tesla wants to prefer any criminal charges, they will have to present a case to the District Attorney who will direct that an arrest warrant is issued if the DA believes that there is a case.

Re: Security

As insecure as they sometimes are, computers often are more secure than their users. It appears that may be the case here. It has been well known for years that the largest risks to networks and their computers comes from authorized users, whether malicious or dull.

Re: Security

That's why a huge part of the security of computer systems is controlling who has access to what. If some technician has access to critical data without controls then the security of the system has failed.

Re: Security

This must be especially difficult in a rapidly changing company like tesla, Additionally, they have I think 37,000 staff of which 9,000 are being culled but new postions opening. Lots of change, lots of risk.

Let me guess...

...after Tesla releases their next dire quarterly figures, Mr.Tripp's 'sabotage' will be to blame.

If this wasn't more Musk BS, then there would be a full-on criminal investigation with the FBI involved in order to encourage any others with ideas of committing similar 'sabotage'.

Have a guess how many competitors of Tesla would want to look at Tesla's 'secret sauce' for producing not many cars of poor quality that can kill you? Maybe some for the lolz but not for any competitive edge.

Re: Let me guess...

"Have a guess how many competitors of Tesla would want to look at Tesla's 'secret sauce' for producing not many cars of poor quality that can kill you? Maybe some for the lolz but not for any competitive edge."

It would be handy to know what they are paying for each component part, having a complete list of suppliers and what Tesla is spending on warranty could be good info to have. How about what the Supercharger network costs to run and how they are structuring deals with power companies.

The car itself isn't a big deal. Competitors are already buying them and taking them to bits. That's normal. If they don't want to do the work themselves, they can buy a report with a full analysis on a tear down and just take the car they bought and run it for more subjective data. It's not intuitive, but the finished product is less interesting than the accounting.

Re: Tripp?

Time will tell if Tesla's claims are accurate

I'm sure that none of these claims against Tripp are going to fix the low model 3 production numbers, the 9% work force cuts, pending lawsuits for deaths from autopilot use, poor cash flow, etc. that Tesla is experiencing but it may distract media attention from them for a week or two.

Wow

Anti-Tesla anti-Musk forces are out in force today.

I'm more of a optimist. Tesla will fix production (AFAICT, it's pretty much already fixed), Model 3 will continue to sell shitloads, autopilot will get better, other manufacturers will all release full electric cars in the next 2 years, Tesla shorters will lose their hats (good, shorting stocks and trying to force the stocks down when they won't do it by themselves is a pretty offensive way to make money)

Not Just Norway

In Missouri they leveled the top of its highest "mountain" and built a reservoir. During the night at low demand, water is pumped up from the river below to the reservoir. During the day the water flows down through a pipe bored down through the middle of the mountain and spins the generators.

Built in the 1960s. It's very odd to stand on top of a mountain well above everything else around and gaze across a huge sheet of water at eye level - like an infinity pool gone beserk.